the mend and that in the course of
time, if she leads a tremendously healthy life, she'll be able to take
off her muzzle and become as dangerous again as ever. It keeps her
going."

"And what keeps _you?_ You're good until the parties begin again."

"Oh, she doesn't object to me now!" smiled Mrs. Meldrum. "I'm going
to take her abroad; we shall be a pretty pair." I was struck with this
energy and after a moment I inquired the reason of it. "It's to divert
her mind," my friend replied, reddening again, I thought, a little. "We
shall go next week: I've only waited, to start, to see how your mother
would be." I expressed to her hereupon my sense of her extraordinary
merit and also that of the inconceivability of Flora's fancying herself
still in a situation not to jump at the chance of marrying a man like
Dawling. "She says he's too ugly; she says he's too dreary; she says in
fact he's 'nobody,'" Mrs. Meldrum pursued. "She says above all that he's
not 'her own sort.' She doesn't deny that he's good, but she insists on
the fact that he's grotesque. He's quite the last person she would ever
dream of." I was almost disposed on hearing this to protest that if the
girl had so little proper feeling her noble suitor had perhaps served
her right; but after a while my curiosity as to just how her noble
suitor _had_ served her got the better of that emotion, and I asked
a question or two which led my companion again to apply to him the
invidious epithet I have already quoted. What had happened was simply
that Flora had at the eleventh hour broken down in the attempt to
put him off with an uncandid account of her infirmity and that his
lordship's interest in her had not been proof against the discovery of
the way she had practised on him. Her dissimulation, he was obliged to
perceive, had been infernally deep. The future in short assumed a new
complexion for him when looked at through the grim glasses of a bride
who, as he had said to some one, couldn't really, when you came to find
out, see her hand before her face. He had conducted himself like any
other jockeyed customer--he had returned the animal as unsound. He had
backed out in his own way, giving the business, by some sharp shuffle,
such a turn as to make the rupture ostensibly Flora's, but he had none
the less remorselessly and basely backed out. He had cared for her
lovely face, cared for it in the amused and haunted way it had been her
poor little delusive gift to make me